asus

Have you ever had trouble connecting your Windows PC to a wireless network? Yeah, me too. It seems that the wireless capabilities of many Windows based machines can be rather finicky. But sometimes it’s not the computer’s fault.

Yesterday afternoon, my son reported that his Asus laptop wouldn’t charge. It’s about a year and a half old and has shown no other signs of trouble. A bit of basic troubleshooting suggested that it was the laptop itself, not the charger.

We’re currently on vacation and my kids have been struggling with the wifi network where we’re staying. Every once in awhile their computers will lose (and be unable to re-gain) network connectivity. Very frustrating.

Whew. After a boatload of troubleshooting, I think I’ve finally narrowed in on the cause of our internet woes. In short, our AT&T FastAccess DSL was periodically losing connectivit and failing to load pages. But then it would start working again.

Okay… After a firmware update and changing over to OpenDNS, we’re still suffering from DNS issues. I’ve checked with my neighbor who has the same ISP as us and his connection is rock solid, suggesting that we have a hardware issue.

As I noted earlier, we recently bought a couple of Asus laptops. Though I was pleasantly surprised by the (relatively) small amount of bloatware that was present when we first booted them up, there was stuff that needed to be removed.

We picked up a pair of Asus U47A laptops for our kids this weekend. The price was right, and these things have pretty nice specs. I’ve spent a few hours since that time setting them up (and removing bloatware) and have encountered some annoyances.

Here’s some more diy computer goodness for you… I just showed you how to upgrade the RAM in your Asus Eee PC. What about replacing or upgrading your hard drive? As it turns out, this is just as easy as adding RAM to your computer.